Love Your Sacred Foe Process

Love your Sacred Foe 5 Step Process Guided Visualization for Peace for CSL Crossroads

Rather than trying to convince the mind that we are all ONE, which usually takes very advanced practices, let’s start with a more modest goal. I’d like to propose a 5-step process to “Love Your Sacred Foe” instead:

1. Pull up a picture in your mind of someone who is sometimes difficult for you to feel loving and peaceful towards.

- Recall the actions of this person and really feel your resistance towards this person.

- Play out in your mind the narratives for why you should not include this person in a field of love…why you should withhold from them a deliberate intent of peaceful energy.

2. Now imagine this person going back in time…becoming younger and younger.

- See this person as a young child, perhaps as a school-age child, a toddler, an infant, or even a newborn.

- Go back as far as you need to go to begin to drop the story of withholding love.

- See in your mind’s eye the round face of this sweet little one…

I like to say that if you go back far enough, we are all innocent….and that this innocence is never truly lost.

I personally believe that no baby comes into this world without innocence, trust, and unmet needs.

Unfortunately, many of us come into this world and are greeted by parents and a society that do not see, hear, or hold this baby in ways that contribute to safety, connection, and feeling valued.

Even if this baby has grown up to misbehave in egregious ways, imagine the experiences that this child must have gone through to get to where such behaviors made sense to them.

Visualize the fear, loss, betrayal, anger, resentment, and other difficult circumstances and feeling states that must have contributed to them developing the type of ego defenses that are at the root of their misbehavior.

At some unconscious level, some part of them must be suffering, or else how could someone possibly act in the ways they do?

What we’re doing here is activating compassion for their humanity.

3. Now include this young child in a field of loving care…a deliberate intent of peace.

- Feel the warmth and love and peace gather in your heart, and then allow the arms of your heart to reach out to the child and pull him or her into an energetic heart embrace.

- Send peaceful healing love to this little one who so desperately needs it.

- Here we are using the power of our co-creative conscious intentionality.

4. Now imagine looking in this child ’s eyes.

- Hear yourself saying “You are needed in this world. We are all needed, and this includes you as well.

- I acknowledge that without you, humanity would be incomplete. You matter and you belong in this world.

- I will not dismiss or marginalize you. I will do my best to listen to you, because listening is a form of love.

- I will try to soften my heart when I notice myself resisting you.

- Whether or not we are all ONE in some mystical esoteric sense, my awareness that you are needed CHANGES how I energetically respond to you.

5. Now grow this child up in your mind, but this time with the benefit of your loving embrace and awareness of this person’s value.

- Allow the child to become a teenager, who needs boundaries and love more than ever.

-See the teenager turn into a young adult, who struggles with finding his or her way in the world.

-Stay connected to the person and remain as allowing and loving as possible, until they are their current adult age and you can maintain a loving connection to them in present time.

-Now co-create a potential reality where your firm conviction of the value of your Sacred Foe shifts the dynamic to one of healing and love. Your Sacred Foe will feel this and often respond less defensively.

Conclusion

We all have human needs to feel safe, to feel connected and loved, and to feel valued and valuable.

- Difficult people are often simply employing unskilled defense mechanisms for feeling of fear or threat, disconnection, or disempowerment.

This 5 step process recreates safety, connection and value for another person within you, which creates a foundation for peace to flower.

It also repairs the tendency to “OTHER” or devalue people whom we judge as different than us.

“The experience of love always dissolves the illusion of how we perceive others….This doesn’t preclude protecting and sticking up for ourselves, and it just may be the first step to dismantling a cycle of threat, fear, and retaliation.”

-Kathianne Lewis, Spiritual Director of the Center for Spiritual Living in Seattle, WA.